At least from the American point of view, the selection committee for the Nobel Prize in literature has amassed a spectacular record of irrelevance. After all, it was only two years ago that Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary to the Swedish academy, told the Associated Press that American writers just weren’t up to Nobel standards. Engdahl said: “The U.S. is too isolated. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

Even if you understand what Engdahl was getting at (does he mean American publishers don’t translate enough books into English or that books by Americans aren’t often translated into other languages?) this seemed to indicate that there was no hope for American writers like Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates and the late John Updike. For those of you keeping score, the last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993.

To be fair, looking at Nobel winners over the past 10 years, the Nobel committee has shown good judgment part of the time, choosing Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, Orhan Pamuk and J.M. Coetzee, along with more obscure writers like Herta Muller, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Elfriede Jelinek and Imre Kertesz.

But the history of the prize isn’t much more impressive, having chosen writers like Pearl Buck and John Galsworthy, while passing over Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene and William Trevor. By and large, the Nobel committee seems to make its decision based on politics rather than participation in the “big dialogue of literature,” whatever that is, but regrettable as this is, things are unlikely to change anytime soon.

I bring all this up only because the Swedish academy’s decision to give the 2010 prize to Mario Vargas Llosa is at least cause for celebration. I guess they don’t consider South American writers to be American, but whatever the reason, one hopes winning the prize serves to introduce more American readers to the author of “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” “The War of the End of the World” and other novels.

Vargas Llosa, who is spending a year in residence at Princeton, is a representative of what has been called the “boom generation” of Latin American writers, which included Nobel winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Amado, Julio Cortazar and others. Important in themselves, these writers are noteworthy for their influence on the works of such American novelists as John Barth and Donald Barthelme.

Rest assured, however, that the simple fact of Vargas Llosa’s selection doesn’t mean the Nobel committee has forsaken politics. They just moved from the left to the right. Shortly after being selected, Vargas Llosa was quoted by The New York Times as saying, “It’s very difficult for a Latin American writer to avoid politics. Literature is an expression of life, and you cannot eradicate politics from life.”

Maybe so, but by any measure Vargas Llosa took this to a new level by running for the presidency of Peru in 1990, when the country was suffering from economic problems and attacks on public officials by the Shining Path guerrilla movement. Vargas Llosa narrowly lost to Alberto Fujimori, after leading in the polls for much of the race.

Regardless of the results of that election, it’s remarkable that a writer could compete for high political office anywhere. Imagine any writer, no matter how distinguished, running for president in the U.S., for example. Never mind, don’t bother.

Those who root for underdogs, however, should be especially pleased by Vargas Llosa’s selection. In Great Britain, where people presumably are involved in Engdahl’s “big dialogue,” Ladbrokes, the bookmaking chain, was taking bets on the Nobel selection up to the last minute. Ladbrokes had Vargas Llosa going off at 25-1, and it looked bad for the Peruvian since the smart money was down on Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o or South Korean poet Ko Un.

Ladbrokes isn’t saying what the handle is on things like this, but it appears they took a bath, not just on the Nobel, but last month’s Man Booker Prize, as well, where underdog Howard Jacobson won for “The Finkler Question,” which has just been published in this country.

None of this is really very important, of course, to literature or even to most writers. But prizes and prize winners get lots of attention and with luck, sell books for the authors, who richly deserve the proceeds.

Of course, we still have the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the Pulitzer to look forward to, but there is some satisfaction in knowing that this year, unlike too many in the past, the Nobel committee actually got it right when they chose Vargas Llosa as the winner.

In an imperfect world, that’s something for which we can be grateful.

David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University. You can reach him at david.milofsky@colostate.edu.